Let's get into it.

Tech Giants and Trump are headed to China

Earlier this week, it was announced that Trump would be traveling to China for the first time since 2017. Considering that China purchases roughly 80-90% of Iran’s oil exports, one of Trump’s goals is certainly to utilize China in his negotiations. If China were to pressure its oil plug, then the U.S could potentially reach a deal faster.

However, that's not the end of the story. Over the last few days, it's been announced that Trump is bringing an absolutely stacked entourage of Tech Giants. Here are the highlights from his mega-rich pose.

Tim Cook - CEO of Apple
Elon Musk - CEO/Chief Meme Officer of Tesla, SpaceX, xAI, etc. 
Jensen Huang - CEO of Nvidia (And slick jacket aficionado)
Larry Fink - CEO of BlackRock (Not the company that owns all the homes)
Stephen Schwarzman - CEO of Blackstone (Actually, the company that owns all the homes)
Kelly Ortberg - CEO of Boeing
David Solomon - CEO of Goldman Sachs
Sanjay Mehrotra - CEO of Micron Technologies

So what's actually going on here? Clearly, these guys aren’t all going over to talk about Iran. 

The truth is, the U.S and China are in the midst of a delicate balancing act. They are each other's greatest threats in the matter of global supremacy, and simultaneously, both of their economies would be crushed without the other. 

As everyone and their mother already knows by now, China provides the U.S with an enormous amount of manufacturing power. But they are also one of the largest suppliers of the natural resources required to manufacture semiconductors, advanced weapon systems, batteries, and more.

Now these CEOs are not joining Trump on Air Force One out of the goodness of their hearts. They want easier access to manufacturing in China, reduced export restrictions, and the ability to sell goods to China.

China wants many of these things too. But potentially their biggest concern is the U.S’ block on exports of advanced technology to China. The U.S has been placing export controls on companies such as Nvidia, limiting China’s access to semiconductors and other materials needed to make advancements in AI, military technology, and more. 

The U.S is bringing these companies along as leverage to get what it wants, which is economic stability. But in order to do that, Trump is going to have to give China some of what it wants. That's where his gaggle of CEOs comes into play. China needs the tech and manufacturing business of these foreign companies. 

If Trump plays his cards correctly, he can give China just enough of what it wants in order to stabilize the economy while maintaining a technological advantage over it. 

On the other hand, this is Trump we’re talking about. So maybe it’s time to pack our bags and prepare for WWIII - The Invasion of Taiwan.

Andreessen Horowitz’s spending is off the charts

Marc Andreesen, founder of a16z, is well known for having the pointiest head in venture capital. But now, he’s slowly becoming known for being the biggest spender in US politics. So far, he has already contributed over $115M to the midterm election.

Clearly, investing in startup’s which are bound to fail was enough for him; now he is investing in electing officials who are also likely to fail.

Jokes aside, this isn’t that surprising when you think about it. Marc’s entire business revolves around putting capital into emerging industries that will hopefully explode. But the U.S. government has the power to shape legislation that could get in the way.

We’ve already seen the government crack down on one of Horowitz's favorite industries, Crypto. During the Biden administration, the federal government went to war with the crypto industry. The SEC threw countless lawsuits against major companies. A lot of these companies started before there were any laws or regulations around crypto. That ambiguity turned out to be a massive problem for many companies.

The AI industry is now in a fairly similar boat. Technology is outpacing regulation, and with so much of A16z’s investments in the AI space, they are trying to get in front of the problem to avoid the same fate that fell their crypto investments.

Time will tell how this will shape out, but you can bet your bottom dollar that Marc is going to try to get his money’s worth.

Anthropic is making Altman sweat

For the first time since its inception, Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in business adoption. According to Ramp, the expense management startup, the number of businesses paying for a monthly AI subscription reached 50.6%.

The interesting part comes from the breakdown of that total number. 34.4% of Ramps customers paid for an Anthropic subscription in April, up 3.8% from March. Worryingly for Sam Altman, only 32.3% paid for OpenAI, down 2.9% from the previous month.

Now granted, this is only a single month so we still need to see if this trend continues to hold  up. But the rapid expansion in competition in the LLM space is surely going to test OpenAI’s ability to stay a top dog in the industry.

Regardless of what happens, we’ll continue to keep an eye on this and report back. Only time will tell if these early players will continue to maintain a dominant position in the AI landscape.

This Week In Tech

• Isomorphic Labs secures a $2.1B investment to develop drugs using AI (IL)

• Snowhawk $1.3B for its digital infrastructure Fund (PR)

• NVIDIA hits a new all-time high, becoming the first company in history to pass $5.5T (YF)

• Intel and Apple have struck a preliminary deal, with Intel to manufacture Apple chips (WSJ) 

• Scale AI revenue expected to rebound to over $1B under new CEO (F)

• Blackstone has moved on from houses and is now setting its eyes on Data centers (BS)

Meanwhile… 

• Anduril, Defense technology ($5B @ $61B)

• Mind Robotics, Industrial robots ($400M @ $3.4B)

• Oishii, Indoor smart farms ($150M @ ~$1B)

• Corgi, Full-stack insurance platform ($160M @ $1.3B)

• Fractile, AI chip developer ($200M @ ~$1B)

Let us know what you thought of today's issue.

Until then.

Thanks for reading. We'll be back next Friday with more proof that nobody knows what they're doing.

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